Since last month, I’ve added another ninety images to the Traceable Heraldic Art collection.
Thanks to Iago ab Adam for continuing to send attractive line art adapted from period sources, and to new contributor Zubeydah al-Badawiyyah for filling a gap in the collection of cross variations. Continue reading “May Additions to Traceable Art”
Bruce Draconarius’s “A Grammar of Blazonry” remains the canonical reference for the structure of blazons in the SCA, despite being more than thirty years old.
However, Bruce did make a few minor adjustments to the document recently, and unfortunately those changes have not yet propagated back to the version on the heraldry.sca.org website.
So I was very pleased when Bruce gave me permission to post the updated version here for ease of use in classes; it’s now available here:
[Update, January 2024:] For the latest version of this document, see Identifying Charge Groups Revisited which simplifies the flow of the questions.
The concept of “charge groups” was developed within Society heraldry to facilitate analysis of armorial designs; although that phrase isn’t used in either period or modern heraldry, it is an effective way of understanding the actual designs that appear in period armory.
The rules for charge group analysis are set forth in Appendix I of SENA. and are covered in the “Armory 102” video class at East Kingdom Herald University.
To start, find a group of one or more charges of a similar size and in a related arrangement, then consider their placement and relationship to other charges to categorize them as follows:
Continue reading “Identifying Charge Groups”Assembling and refining the Traceable Art collection has been an ever-growing project over the last three years.
Thank you to each of the artists who contributed illustrations to this effort, and to those who posted their creations online under licenses that allowed them to be collected here. Their names are catalogued in the Sources section, and this collection would not exist without them.
I am very grateful to the Pennsic Traceable Art project, led by Ailis Linne, which provided the inspiration for this collection, and was initially the primary source of material. A special thanks to Þórý Veðardóttir for recruiting me to work on updating that resource, and for providing feedback during the first year.
Many thanks to the heralds of the SCA for the years of research and the reference material which informed this work. Notable among these is Bruce Draconarius of Mistholme, creator of the Pictorial Dictionary of Heraldry, aka the “PicDic,” a truly invaluable resource.
Particular thanks for the helpful feedback received from Beatrice Domenici della Campana, Kryss Kostarev, Muirenn ingen Dúnadaig, Tanczos Istvan, Thóra Róarsdóttir, Yehuda ben Moshe, and the members of the SCA Heraldry Unofficial Chat group on Facebook.
My sincere appreciation to folks who have contacted me with corrections, including Basil Dragonstrike, Konrad Mailander, Michael Gerard Curtememoire, Amy Hanson, Alexandre Saint Pierre, and Cormac Mór.
